Last updated: Have no fear, robotic process automation is here

Have no fear, robotic process automation is here

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The promise of automation is helping businesses worldwide eliminate mundane everyday tasks that keep people from more engaging and valuable work. But many have abandoned their automation dreams at the thought of coding their first proof of concept. Today, RPA technology is helping people stay on track.

A growing number of companies are embracing the emerging trend of low-code and no-code development, which empowers non-technical workers to take advantage of robotic process automation (RPA).

“RPA really captures the imagination because it has capabilities such as low-code,” Sarah Burnett, Head of Technology Immersion at Emergence Partners, said. “It’s all about making code development easy and fast, and having modular model-based developments. And particularly with the advent of RPA, we’re seeing this concept of ‘citizen developers,’ making it easy for non-techie folks to develop software.”

To learn more, I sat down with Burnett and Darwin Deano, Principal and CTO for U.S. enterprise performance and SAP businesses at Deloitte. In a recent interview, we discussed the power of the low-code to no-code movement and how RPA technology is currently being applied through hyperautomation.

You can watch our conversation in the second episode of this new LinkedIn Live series “CXO Corner”.

RPA technology: Empowering new and untrained developers

As more and more businesses embrace low-code and no-code development, they’ve discovered the added benefit of reusing their code. Deano said that CTOs and other leaders across the organization have a lot to gain by understanding this value.

By reusing existing code with RPA technology, companies can:

1. Save time and effort related to their automation projects
2. Get new bots up and running faster
3. Empower employees with little-to-no coding know-how to build bots themselves

Low-code and no-code development are also helping businesses to embrace hyperautomation, another trend picking up speed in the automation space. Burnett described hyperautomation as taking automation to the next level and said it’s automating business processes that hadn’t been extensively automated in the past.

Deano said it comes down to reducing the burden on people by automating and making things that exist today faster.

“For example, we achieved greater than 90% reduction in processing time for manufacturing stock deficit errors,” Deano said. “That’s a great example of automating what currently exists. But what we advocate is taking it to the next level. Balancing efficiency and value to realize the future of work. Using automation to rearchitect work and unleash the full human potential.”

Attended and unattended automation 

As more employees begin to dip their toes into the waters of automation, they need to understand the difference between two primary types of automation: attended and unattended.

Attended automation is typically run on an employee’s desktop and activated by an employee when the bot is needed. For example: If a contact center agent needs to update customer data, she can activate a bot that will make those updates and then propagate that change across multiple systems.

“So, a robot can take that piece of data and take it to multiple systems,” Burnett said. “That piece of intelligence can be coming from a chatbot, for example. This is where it really becomes hyperautomation, where you’re mixing different kinds of complementary technologies to achieve end-to-end automation.”

Workers can use unattended automation to run bots on a schedule. Unattended automation is useful for data entry and data manipulation scenarios, as well as data cleansing.

Burnett expects the adoption of automation to continue to increase. Soon, we will see a shift to increasing use of attended automation at employees’ desktops, but this will take a significant amount of employee empowerment, which she described as “hand-holding and governance.”

The value of failure

Every automation journey will begin with many proof-of-concept projects, and they won’t all succeed. Burnett and Deano emphasized the value of failure just as much as the value of success.

“You should learn from any failure and build up your knowledge and experience to build up to the next bigger, better thing. Leadership is really important and having that mind-set of, ‘Go for it, scale it, get it right,’ lead by an automation champion,” she said.

“There is comfort in the familiar. We need to fight that,” Deano said. “In the world of disposable servers and reusable code, in the world of intelligence and automation, it takes courage to embrace what’s possible, to recognize that the processes, the architectures that exist today – a lot of them haven’t fundamentally changed in the last 30 years.”

To hear the full conversation, visit us on LinkedIn.

Learn more about how RPA streamlines business operations HERE.

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